by Ted Elrick
photos by Ken Regan/HBO

Thomas Jane (left) as Mickey Mantle discussing a scene with director Billy Crystal.

On September 8, 1998, St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire entered the record books by hitting his 62nd home run, breaking a record set by New York Yankee Roger Maris in 1961. It had been an exciting race between McGwire and Chicago Cub Sammy Sosa and it resuscitated the public's baseball appetite which had been dulled by a prolonged player's strike a few years before.

The 1998 race was in all respects far different from the 1961 race between Maris and teammate Mickey Mantle. Not only were the competitors playing on the same team, but they also faced hostile sportswriters and fans who did not want to see the record of 60 home runs set by Babe Ruth in 1927 broken.

Baseball's establishment was also eager to protect Ruth's record and Commissioner Ford Frick ruled that in order to break the record the player had to hit 61 homers within 154 games, the number of games played

in the 1927 season. In 1961 two new teams had been added to the American League necessitating that the season be expanded to 162 games. Maris hit his 61st home run in the last game of the season, and he entered the record books with an asterisk after 61, an effort, since reversed, to diminish his remarkable accomplishment.

Despite the pressures, Maris and Mantle became quite close, even rooming together, and though it was Maris who broke Ruth's record, together they set a record for teammates by hitting a combined 115 home runs.

Director Billy Crystal, a longtime Yankee fan, was 13 years old in 1961 and he remembers that race vividly. He set out to re-create the incredible relationship between two athletes under intense pressure in the new HBO movie for television 61*.

Yankee Stadium had been renovated since the '60s, so the production team chose to shoot at Detroit's Tiger Stadium and transformed it through paint and CGI to stand in for the House that Ruth built. DGA Magazine spoke with Crystal about the difficulties of trying to re-create the race and period in a movie for television.

Being a Yankee fan since childhood, you must have idolized Mickey Mantle.

Oh I did, and then I later got to know him very well. Every time I was with him I'd keep thinking, "I can't believe I'm with this guy." So I tried to re-create that summer from stories that he told me, and from the research that the writer, Hank Steinberg, and I did. I wanted to make it as authentic as I could. We did tons of research and also I would just go back into my memory of what that summer was like and what that Yankee Stadium felt like in 1961. Every time I walk in there, even though it's been renovated, I see the old place.

So to get that old feeling in some of the CGI shots, of the awesomeness of the House that Ruth built, to me Yankee Stadium was another character in the movie. I wanted to be able to get inside the clubhouse that I always imagined I was in anyway. You know, like when you're a kid playing stickball and you're making up who you are. That's what I tried to do as a director, make it as real as possible. I didn't let anything get by us. I had C. J. Maguire, the best prop man in the world, and Rusty Smith, who did a phenomenal job as a production designer. We didn't let it not look right.

Barry Pepper as Roger Maris.

There's nobody else who could play these parts and work as hard as they did and be as believable as they were. It's a terrific cast all the way through, but the triangle of the three of us and the trust that they put in me, knowing I was basically sort of like Rainman with all the Yankee background. I said to Tom, "Listen, I've been imitating Mantle since I was 8. I know every nuance in the batting cage from both sides of the plate. But I also know how he held a drink, how he salted his food, how he held a knife and fork, because of my friendship with him." After awhile, once we got going, I just stopped seeing Tom; I started seeing Mickey.

Had Thomas Jane played baseball?

Never, never. [Former Red Sox and Dodger player] Reggie Smith has a baseball camp in the Valley and he worked amazing wonders with him. Tom's role is hard work, to be Mantle you have to be a switch hitter and swing from both sides of the plate. And to swing to make it look like you're hitting the ball 450 feet. He does, which is a stunning accomplishment in the eight weeks he had to learn.

Barry is extraordinary. And a terrific athlete, but still, he never hit from the left side before; he's a right-hander, Maris hit left. So these two guys were just stunning. We'd get out early at Tiger Stadium and watch these two men run in the outfield or play catch or take batting practice in the Yankee pinstripes and the way we had transformed that field and you just kept saying to yourself, "Oh my God, there they are." It was amazing.

Thomas Jane (center) as Mickey Mantle.

Mickey always said to me if there ever was a movie made about him, he wanted me to do it. And then Ross Greenburg, who's the head of HBO Sports, called me and said, "We've got a Mantle/Maris project. We're talking about doing the summer of '61. You've got to produce it with me." I said, "Well, what's the story? How do you want to do it? And the writer, who was not alive during that season, he's only 29 now." Hank came up and talked to me and we started working on it, and I said, "You know, I think we should tell the story through the eyes of his widow, Pat Maris." And he said, "Why?" Because it had been a totally different story, getting into it. And I said, "Because she's the only one alive who was there, who was so close to Roger. And we all felt something when Mark McGwire ran into the stands after breaking Maris' record and hugged Maris' kids."

So I said, "When that happens, and then the speech that McGwire makes about his bat lying next to Roger's in the Baseball Hall of Fame, that's the beginning and end of this movie. It makes it it grounds it." What I always felt the movie was about was not just about the race, the competitiveness, what America wants from a hero and what they don't want. To me, the movie was about the loss of a husband and father. And I think that's what is so impactful about the movie. You feel that. And when [actress] Pat Crowley, who plays the older Pat Maris, doesn't say a word for like the last minute and a half of the movie, she moves you, because she's missing the man she loves. And that's what I wanted to do.

When I knew I had that, I said, "I can't look over my shoulder at this." I kept putting them off, going, "Well, I don't know. I've got a big offer to act in this," and finally I said, "What am I? Crazy?" And I just pushed everything off and said, "I'm doing this." And it's the most fun, the hardest work, the best work I've ever done.

And it's a big movie. It has tremendous size. I never thought of it as a movie for HBO. My DP was Haskell Wexler. Working with him was another dream. He called me and said, "I want to do this; you want me, you got me." I said great. Jeff Wexler, his son, has been my sound mixer on almost every movie I've done. So I thought, this is a big movie, and I pushed HBO as far as they would let me to make it bigger. We need this CGI shot, that CGI shot, and I'd never done those before. When he hits the ball, it's going to be Yankee Stadium. And we just kept pushing the fences back and HBO was phenomenal about it. And then you have a movie that looks like it's a big feature, which is what I always thought it should be.

What was your shooting schedule?

Thirty-six days.

And did you only shoot in Tiger Stadium?

We shot at the L.A. Coliseum, which we made look like Baltimore. Rusty made it look like the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. We put the fences exactly, the old scoreboard, and cut an infield. The first time there's been an infield there since the Dodgers moved out here in the late '50s. We put dugouts in. We shot it, and then we took the left field wall at the Coliseum and built other walls. You know, I had 61 home runs to shoot and have these guys run around the bases in different ballparks.

I was going to ask you about the Green Wall at Fenway.

Fenway was built at L.A. Coliseum with a wall and a scoreboard, and you put two guys in Red Sox uniforms, then you see Mantle run in his white uniform and boom, he's at Fenway. The same with Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. That had a very high wall, so we built this other green high wall and changed the dugout colors. So L.A. Coliseum served as a bunch of stadiums. I mean, that was a gigantic job. That was all night stuff. The other huge job was turning Tiger Stadium into Yankee Stadium and back again to Tiger Stadium; 55,000 seats covered with paint or fabric. We even had it right down to the nuts and bolts. The deco design that was in the walls of Yankee Stadium is evident. Anything to break up what would be recognizable as Tiger Stadium. Then painting it that light green that Yankee Stadium was in '61. Our CGI house, Centropolis, did great work. Everyone just fell in love with this time period. Everybody who didn't know about baseball started to know about baseball, and they wanted to get it just perfect. There's a night shot when Roger hits his 60th home run actually it bounced off the second deck that's a totally created shot that I said, let the ball fly by the moon and hit in the upper deck. That's all created by them. It's an amazing illusion that we're in that ballpark.

How long was your post-production?

Well, I'm finishing now. [March] We had one little problem with one shot, one sequence rather, when Roger loses his hair. We had a flicker problem that has taken a long time to get out. But I started cutting September 16. So it's been a long time.

And you're in the midst of another film.

Yes. America's Sweethearts. Writing, producing, and starring in this one. But it all worked out fine. It's been a labor of God, you hear that cliché but I love this movie and I'm sorry to see it end. But I'm glad that people will start to see it now.

Would you agree that good sports films are not really about sports?

It's about people. I don't think it's really a baseball movie, per se. It's about these guys and you love these guys and you pull for them and we know the ending but we want to know how they got there. For fans who didn't know about this time period and how people turned against Roger and wanted Mickey to win the race, the summer they finally fell in love with Mickey because they didn't want the other guy. It had tremendous dynamics, and the fact that they lived together.

Mickey had told me all of these stories about how they'd watched The Andy Griffith Show, and I just interpreted it and put it in and made it funnier. Just imagining this wild mustang [Mantle] watching Barney Fife and Opie. I said, that's got to be funny. So we panned across Roger Maris, saw him whistling and then Mantle just feeling miserable. When we watched McGwire and Sosa, it was riveting, and it was a tremendous battle. But Maris and Mantle were on the same team, playing alongside each other, in that place, in that stadium. Maris played the same position Ruth played.

That must have been incredible pressure.

It was amazing pressure. Roger was 25 years old, and Mickey was a seasoned 29. What I also needed to do, with the consent of the Mantle family, who had approval on the script, was show my hero with warts and all. You see him drinking, you see him womanizing, and if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have done justice to the movie. I mean, it's stuff Mickey admitted to and I think if he were alive he'd say, "You didn't do it right, come on, I fucked up a lot. Why didn't you show that?" So what I tried to do was plant the seeds of what we would later find out about Mickey 30 years later. You know, about his fears about dying young, about inheriting the Hodgkins that his father and his uncle had. He always had this line, "If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself." And so that's in there.

It's interesting to see how athletes' habits have changed over the years. You show Maris as a chain smoker.

Roger smoked three packs a day, easy. Joe DiMaggio smoked four packs a day. If you look in these old score books, it's all cigarettes and beer. And that's what we show in the clubhouse; they're drinking beer. Mick used to say to me, "God, after a hot day wearing those flannels, you'd lose five, six pounds. You'd start hitting the beer." He said, "I'd be a little looped by the time I got out of the clubhouse." They don't have that anymore.

How much time did you have for rehearsals?

We had very little because of the schedule. You know, we only had like a nine-week, ten-week prep. For a movie of this size, plus a lot of it shooting in Detroit, flying back and forth. We had a read-through and just a little bit of rehearsal time. Plus the guys had to work on their swings and all the baseball stuff. I'd go out to Reggie's place and run lines with them, and have minimal, very minimal rehearsals. I was so prepared and Haskell and I had talked about what we wanted to do, and everything just fell in. What I really felt great about was I don't think there was one day, with the exception of some of the things that were carefully plotted, where I had a shot list. I knew what I sort of wanted to do, but I'd come and say, let's get rehearsal. All right, we're here, we're here. I want to do this and then I just want to make my transitions really great and let the guys play and see where they wanted to go. And I just felt so I don't know, I don't want to sound like I'm patting myself on the back, but I just felt so fluid and plugged in to what I thought was right for the movie.

How long did you work on the script with Hank Steinberg?

Well, more than a year, almost two years on and off.

Director Billy Crystal at work.

Oh, yes. It was a tight, really good piece. We had a couple of readings, worked out the kinks. Then the guys had input into what they wanted to do and say at times. Then you'd change and rewrite on the spot. Hank was there a lot. And I was there to change stuff and help them if they were uncomfortable with something. I've found now I'm calling it a feature this is the third feature that I've directed and I'm starting to understand directing so much better than on the prior two, which I felt very strong about. But this one in particular, because it was so hard and fast, 36 days, 15- or 16-hour days, pushing Haskell and the crew because we had to, with nary a complaint. Everyone just loved this project. I just felt like this is all I want to do now. I love acting, I love performing, but the greatest thrill in my life was directing this movie and watching people watch it. I don't know how many thousands of times I've seen it and worked on it and so on. I never get tired of it. Where with other movies I've been, all right, enough already, time. I'm sorry to give this one up.

Did you have much feedback from the Maris family?

Yes. I showed them the film it was an amazing experience. I was mixing, and Ross Greenburg, my partner, flew down to Gainesville with a print and we set up a screening for the family. I was on the mixing stage going, "All right, it just ended, why isn't the phone ringing?" Phone rings, like right on cue. "Billy, it's Ross," and Ross is all choked up on the phone. I said, "How'd it go?" "Somebody wants to talk to you." "Billy? I'm Roger Maris' mother; you got it right." And I went, oh God, and I got emotional on the other side of the mixing stage, while I'm watching this man play her son, who died 16 years ago. She goes, "How did you know he was did you know Roger? He never mentioned that he " I said, "No, but I feel like I do." And she said, "How did this young man...?" And I said, "Well, he's a great actor." Then Pat [Maris] got on the phone, and said the same thing, "How did you know?" And then the kids got on the phone, and all they kept saying was "Thank you, thank you, thank you, you got it right." Then we flew them here for the Television Critics Association meetings, and we had a screening with the Mantle family, the boys, and it was real emotional because Mickey Jr. had died about three weeks prior to that. And so here were David and Danny Mantle and the Marises watching these guys be their dads. And we just held on to each other for about ten minutes afterward; no one could say anything. It was pretty fabulous. It was great.

You don't get many instances like that in show business.

Oh no, I mean, if I had to fold my cards now and say, "I'm out, that's it, I'm finished. Thank you very much, it's been great, that's a wrap." You know, I've done everything I wanted to do. This one I don't know how much better it gets than this.

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